Road Cut through a Hill

A sloping road rises from the bottom of the picture, with its upper edge meeting the blue sky directly. At the left a white wall continues atop a stone embankment, and at the right a grassy bank rises steeply. Two long shadows cross the road in the foreground, and even the bumps in the dry earth, the pebbles and the grass at the roadside are carefully rendered. A signature and date appear at the lower right, with another signature at the lower left.

This work was painted over about ten days in November 1915. Around this time Ryusei was beginning to move away from the influence of classical Western painting and trying to face nature directly. It dates from the period between 1913 and 1917 when he lived in places such as Yoyogi. Ryusei himself said of this work that the earth and grass capture the beauty of the soil itself. It is a work in which he established his own style of realism, and a representative landscape.

In 1916 it was exhibited at the second Sodosha exhibition under the title Sketch of a Cut-through, and it was also shown at his solo exhibition in 1919 and the memorial exhibition held after his death in 1930. Transferred from the Agency for Cultural Affairs, it is now in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and is designated an Important Cultural Property.